ARCHAEOLOGICAL PETROLOGY, X-RAY FLUORESCENCE AND OBSIDIAN PROVENANCE STUDIES IN A 21ST CENTURY ARCHAEOLOGY

For the last 50 years beginning with Boyer and Robinson's 1956 refractive index study of New Mexico obsidian and Cann and Renfrew's 1964 study of Mediterranean obsidian, archaeological petrology and the subset of obsidian source provenance studies have profoundly changed our concepts of human prehistory. Between very rapid advances in instrumental technology, particularly x-ray fluorescence spectrometry (XRF), and shifts in archaeological method and theory, early 21st century archaeology views archaeological petrology and source provenance studies as integral parts of what we do in archaeology. In 1977, exactly 30 years ago, Graeme Ward published a paper in the New Zealand Archaeological Society Newsletter entitled: “On the Ease of Sourcing Artefacts and the Difficulty of Knowing Prehistory”. Have we progressed much beyond Ward's point of discussion? Has the instrumental advances of the last few decades yielded data that make it less “difficult to know prehistory”? Is desktop and portable XRF really the non-destructive panacea for obsidian provenance analysis? What is the role of archaeological petrology in an ever-changing 21st century archaeology? Is it substantially improved since the publication of Kempe and Harvey's 1983 “The Petrology of Archaeological Artefacts”? These topics and issues are worthy of examination at this stage of the field, and will be examined here in some detail. More questions will inevitably arise.